Grid technology began when JAVA technology computer logic was produced at SUN MICROSYSTEMS, INC., along with JAVA tools and JAVA Applets that enable distributed processing. Limitations on traditional JAVA Applets were that they required a web page in which to operate. To distribute the data processing traditional JAVA applets required a server to coordinate the distribution of data to various computers or central processing units (CPUs). The traditional anatomy of a grid includes a server with the computers, which together form the actual grid. One well-known example of a grid computing project is run by the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), which uses unused CPU cycles on thousands of computers around the world to process signal information in search of coherent signals indicating intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Additional developments in connected computing include UDDI (Universal Description Discovery and Integration), which may be considered to be a registry of the types of services a participant in a computing network can provide to the network. Also, various forms of business to business (B2B) implementations exist, including ROSETTANET, which describes distributed processing of trading requests between trading partners.
However, there are limitations on trading networks, especially because of the non-homogeneous nature of computing capabilities across a network, randomly based upon what computing devices are participating in the network. Discrepancies of computing capability may limit the ability of computing devices on the network to interact, and certainly restricts the ability of the network to expand in functionality and evolve over time.